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After spending a couple of hours in their small kitchen waiting for the brew to boil, some of the guys are getting restless. They begin to argue about whether or not to make rice — the type of pointless argument sophomore Oren Lavie says is common during the three-hour brewing process.
“Guys, let’s brew some beer,” exclaims sophomore Max Feldman, interrupting the dispute. After all, for Feldman and the rest of his housemates, beer is a uniting factor.
Lavie and Feldman learned to brew beer from another housemate, sophomore Phill Baker, who in turn learned from friends when he was 18 and taking a gap year between high school and Penn.
“It’s a good, friendly bonding experience,” he says. “It’s better than doing drugs.”
After the friends moved off campus this year, they bought some brewing equipment on Craigslist and started making their own beer.
“We all get together,” Feldman says, calling brewing “a house event.”
“Brewing beer is just a very chill process,” adds sophomore Tom Walsh, who also lives with them.
While homebrewing is often less expensive than buying beer — good beer, that is — saving money is only an added benefit. Brewing is about the experience. “You get to see how it’s made, and you get to see all the different tastes and smells,” says Baker. “That’s definitely an exciting part.”
For Engineering graduate student Ross Marklein, brewing is a skill that will stay with him for life. “It’s not like a sport or something where, if you stop doing it, you’ll kind of lose it,” he says. “You’ll always have the knowledge.”
Marklein learned to brew this past Christmas after he and his brother agreed to buy each other the book Extreme Brewing: An Enthusiast’s Guide to Brewing Craft Beer at Home by Sam Calagione, the founder and president of Dogfish Head, a microbrewery in Rehoboth Beach, Del. While Marklein hasn’t tried the book’s more exotic recipes — one of the beers lists kiwi as an ingredient, for example — he has tested out the book’s formula for an imperial pale ale. “It’s like our little baby,” he says proudly of the brew.
After Christmas, Marklein bought his own homebrewing starter kit and has been trying different brews ever since. His goal is to keep learning new recipes, even after he’s found something that works.
“Even if it tastes the best, I wouldn’t want to keep making it,” he says. “I would want to try something new.”
Still, he says he’s not ready to experiment just yet. The closest he’s come to straying from a recipe was when he accidentally added dark brown sugar instead of light brown sugar to a batch. He wants to master the basics before throwing kiwis into the mix.
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